Time to appreciate our parks

Last week, the National Park Service launched a new public relations campaign aimed raising public awareness of the treasures it keeps available for all. The campaign urges folks to “Find Your Park” and is premised on the idea that many people don’t know about relatively local parks managed for their benefit by NPS.

Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area is one such park. Remarkably, Lake Roosevelt is coming up on its 70th anniversary in 2016 when the NPS itself will celebrate its centennial.

A central feature of the new awareness campaign is a website that makes it easy to find your park. Findyourpark.com will ask you if it’s OK to use your current location. If you click yes, up comes a page with a map with all the nearby NPS sites. The page that comes up here shows 23 sites stretching from the coast of Washington and northern Oregon to western North Dakota, not just Glacier and Yellowstone. Who knew?

The United States gave birth to the concept of “national parks,” and it’s one of the nation’s greatest and most under appreciated achievements, preserving our natural lands against the relentless onslaught of progress, for all to enjoy, forever.

We need to pay more attention to that, and the NPS’s latest encouragement to do so is a needed push in that direction.

Scott Hunter

editor and publisher